The dead keep publishing, and the living keep cashing in

Now comes The Land of Sweet Forever, a patchy collection of juvenilia and discarded sketches pulled from her New York apartment. The stories are slight, underdeveloped, and largely forgettable. But that hardly matters, the name sells.

The Life of Violet, edited by Urmila Seshagiri, is a compendium of Woolf’s fantastical stories about a giantess, feminist fables written early in her career, never revised and never published in her lifetime. Marketed as a literary event, it is in truth more of an academic curiosity than essential reading.

But in a promotional climate where anything with a famous signature is treated as a major release, lost masterpiece has become less a descriptor than a marketing tool.

These books hardly appear by accident. They reflect a broader shift in the literary landscape, where death used to mark the end of an author’s output, it now signals a new phase of content rollout. Posthumous publishing, once rare and debated, has become routine. The dead, it turns out, are a reliable business.

Publishing houses that once focused on literary preservation now lean heavily into brand extension. Estates once charged with safeguarding a writer’s legacy have started to resemble production studios, with archives mined for marketable fragments, no matter how minor.

Legacy as product

Kafka wanted his work destroyed. Instead, it became the blueprint for literary afterlives. (Wikimedia Commons)

There is precedent for this, and justification, in some cases. Franz Kafka asked that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed. His friend Max Brod refused, and the world gained The Trial and The Castle, and Kafka’s place in literary history. Virgil, on his deathbed, reportedly asked for The Aeneid to be burned. That too was ignored.

Now, consider Notes to John, a journal of therapy sessions by the late essayist and novelist Joan Didion, released earlier this year. Didion left no instructions about the document. Her estate took that silence as permission. Her friends strongly disagreed, and they are likely right. Notes to John is deeply personal and out of step with everything Didion chose to publish in life. It is a private document leaked under the guise of tribute.

This is where the ethical line gets crossed. Just because something exists does not mean it should be published. Yet the packaging of these works rarely acknowledges their raw, unfinished nature. Instead, they are described in reverent terms “rediscovered,” “long-lost,” “revealing.” The literary equivalent of “never-before-seen footage,” positioned to create urgency and importance, even when the content more often than not does not justify it.

There is, admittedly, a scholarly appeal. An unpolished story, a scribbled journal, a failed experiment allows us peek behind the curtain. But we forget that these pieces were often left unfinished or unpublished for a reason. The authors are no longer there to decide whether they want these pieces to be part of their literary oeuvre.

Market value

That brings us to Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize–winning Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, who died in 2014. In his final years, he was reportedly working on a novel, Until August, while suffering from dementia. He asked his family not to publish it. They went ahead regardless.

His sons admitted the decision was “an act of betrayal,” but, they claimed, a loving one. They believed the novel was better than he remembered and that readers would forgive what their father might not have. Maybe so, but it is another example of how easily “legacy” is stretched into justification.

In the digital era, every hard drive is an archive, every draft, every email thread a potential product. The boundary between private work and public release has all but vanished.

The literary world owes its dead more than exploitation. It owes them honesty. And maybe, now and then, silence. Until then, the dead will keep publishing. And the living will keep getting paid.

(As I See It  is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)